TRENDING

Groups clash over mapping agency's role

By Sami Lais

Jul 14, 1997

When users and producers of federal mapping data met recently, sharp disagreements arose over how information technology can best meet national policy demands.

It was with some trepidation that Defense and civilian agencies viewed the creation last October of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which combined Defense Department and intelligence mapping organizations into a single group. Though NIMA's outreach efforts have somewhat alleviated anxiety, tough talk on Capitol Hill about NIMA budgets is generating new fears that Congress will underfund the agency.

"I'm not interested in efficiency or saving money or budgets," said James M. Simon, chief of the CIA's Collection Requirements and Evaluation Staff, during a panel discus-sion at the recent Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association TechNet conference in Washington.

But lawmakers are concerned that NIMA and users of its data will turn to new tools and technology before tapping available resources.

Diane S. Roark, staff member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said, "We could save a hell of a lot of money" by using geospatial data collected by unmanned aerial vehicles and spacecraft and by developing common standards in imagery.

Budgetary problems are compounded, Roark said, because the government lacks a post-Cold War policy. With the end of the Cold War, the country's surveillance and imagery needs have changed, she said.

Twenty years ago, when most of its members had served in the armed forces, Congress laid the groundwork for the imagery and geospatial information systems of today's NIMA, Simon said.

"Congress now is mostly lawyers and accountants. They don't do business the way we do. They're trained to avoid risk," he said. "Do you think they'd risk beggaring the national treasury on a bet?"

Simon criticized the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which created a hierarchy of positions and responsibilities for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling some of its effects injurious. "Calling a uniformed bureaucrat a warfighter doesn't change much," he said.

What panelists agreed on was that agencies must change how they interact with NIMA.

Technology should be used to allocate resources to projects that improve our lives, said William B. Wood, director of the State Department's Office of the Geographer and Global Issues.

Use of imagery analysis can't stop with a project or two, he said, but must be applied institutionwide.

First off, NIMA must realize that many of its customers don't understand imagery and geospatial information analysis, how it's done or how they can use it, Wood said.

Simon complained that his intelligence officers were acting as clerks, preparing the 10,000 tasking orders they monthly send to NIMA, detailing what images they want shot, when they want them shot and at what angle.

The solution is to work closer with NIMA to determine what the agency can do to not only answer users' questions, but also fulfill their needs, said Richard J. Stakem, NIMA's director of imagery analysis.

To that end, NIMA has created customer support teams that go to agencies, commands and the services. What the teams look at first is context, Stakem said.

"If you don't know what they want to achieve, you can get them what they asked for, but it won't be what they need," he said. "You first must understand the nature of their problem, of their objective, and then you may be able to find a solution no one thought of before."

When the government created NIMA, civilian intelligence agencies feared their needs would be slighted in favor of those of the military and vice versa.

Whatever perceptions may exist as to who is getting better service, all customers get access to the data at the same time-or at least that's the goal, Stakem said.

Different agencies often want the same information but presented differently, he said. During the Iraqi war, for example, some civilian agencies wanted to know the location, size and composition of forces so they could plan policy, Stakem said. But the Defense Department wanted to know the location, size and composition of forces for operational response planning.

Using the data and analysis that NIMA can supply goes beyond just adding maps to pictures and data, Wood said, to spatially organizing powerful information about the earth's surface for political, geographical and diplomatic analysis.

The next step is making that information available to state and local governments. The Federal Geospatial Data Committee, headed by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, is getting federal agencies to organize and share information, Wood said.

That gets into murky waters for NIMA. Privacy issues prevent the agency from collecting data domestically, Stakem said. NIMA can buy data from commercial collectors, but it runs into problems melding that data with federal data and then releasing it to other users.

"The real challenge in buying data is to create a licensing agreement that delineates what we want to do with the data," said Clay Ansell, commercial advocate for NIMA's Commercial Office.

In May, NIMA began work with the General Services Administration and vendors to create a geospatial and imagery catalog of hardware, software and services-all compliant with the Defense Information Infrastructure's Common Operating Environment, Ansell said.

Some of the software NIMA uses includes ArcInfo and ArcView GIS from Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. of Redlands, Calif.; ImageStation from Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala.; SoftPlotter from CIM Vision International of Torrance, Calif.; and MapInfo Professional from MapInfo Corp. of Troy, N.Y.